California Gold

by John Jakes

  Stories about Nellie: “Colonel Roosevelt, he read her book. Dean, the Harvard football quarterback, he was carryin’ it. So was Stephen Crane, a reporter fella. He said Nellie was famous.”

  “She’s getting there,” Mack agreed. “The book is selling fast. It’ll be published in Europe this fall.”

  Johnson had questions, too.

  “How’s Carla gettin’ on?”

  “Physically she’s fine. She’s big now and she hates that. She stays in bed a lot. I sleep in another bedroom. She wants it that way.”

  On the night of September 27, ten days after Mack turned thirty without a celebration, Carla went into labor. Nearly twenty-four hours later, Dr. Gustav Mellinger stepped out of the master bedroom. Mack jumped up from a chair where he’d been dozing. Before Doc Mellinger shut the door, Mack heard a squall.

  “Doc, is everything—”

  “Fine, my boy. Your son is fine, your wife is doing well.”

  Mack slumped against the wall. He’d slept only lightly, sitting up, since the vigil had begun the previous night. His rumpled clothes had a stale odor, his skin a clammy feel. In spite of it all, his spirits lifted.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “He weighs six and one half pounds. Very strong lungs. You can see him. Your wet nurse has already cleaned him up.”

  The old German stood aside with a gesture of permission. Mack tugged his vest down and tucked in his shirt. As he put his hand on the knob, Mellinger squeezed his shoulder and gave him a keen look he couldn’t interpret. Congratulations? Or some kind of commiseration?

  He heard his son’s soft sucking cry before he saw him. The wet nurse held him in clean soft cotton blankets. Her name was Angelina Olivar. About thirty-five, she had only last month lost her first child, an infant son. Her shiftless husband had run off some months before. She had long braids, compassionate eyes, and a huge bosom contained in a tentlike blouse.

  “Senõr Chance, mire que magnífico se ve.”

  With a new father’s trepidation, Mack lifted a corner of the outer blanket. He gasped at the strange sight of a little red head with a cap of blond fuzz, slitted eyes, puckish open mouth. He touched a tiny fist, still moist. Slowly, like a dawn, the miracle of birth lit Mack’s face.

  The boy-child started to cry again. Angelina Olivar jogged him in her fat arms and nodded Mack onward, toward the bed.

  Doc Mellinger had chosen to deliver the baby under gaslight, keeping it trimmed low, and the dimness softened some of the harsh ancillaries of the birth: basins in a corner, still full of pink water, bloodied cloths.

  In the rumpled bed, Carla sat with her unkempt hair spilling over the shoulders of her gown. Her dark-blue eyes looked huge as moons, and momentarily vacant. She was pale, sweaty, as unattractive as Mack had ever seen her. He took her hand. The line of her mouth remained downcast.

  “The baby’s fine.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “It hurt. My God, it hurt. I never felt anything so awful.”

  “What shall we name him? We talked about it but we never decided. I’d like to give him my father’s name.”

  “Give him any name you want.”

  The bluntness stunned him, but he tried not to show it. Carla rolled her cheek onto the pillow, away from him. He felt suddenly helpless.

  “Do you want to hold him again?”

  “No. I did my part. Now you take care of him. Just like the rest of your property.”

  And so he did. He named his son James Ohio Chance II, and ordered special blankets from Los Angeles. On the corner of each, in handsome embroidery, the seamstress reproduced the familiar cartouche, but with the initials JOC.

  43

  IN THE LATE FALL, engineers from Wardlow Brothers established a field office at San Solaro. Mack hired a firm of land planners, and interviewed real estate men in Los Angeles. Before Christmas he signed an agreement with a successful broker named William Hazard. Hazard’s Sundown Sea Realty Corporation would be the primary selling agent for the new town.

  In January 1899, Cole and Clemons Wardlow stepped off the Southern Pacific in Los Angeles, and soon plunged into their studies and preparations for designing a water system. The brothers neither drank nor smoked. For relaxation they read the Scriptures. They worked six days a week, and as many nights. On Sundays they worshiped at a Baptist church.

  Toward the end of the month, a wrinkled envelope without an address brought Mack a tear sheet from the Monarch of the Dailies. On January 15 the Examiner had published a poem called “The Man with the Hoe.” The paper presented it in decorative type, with an ornamental border. Across the bottom Mack found a scrawled message: A wonderful work of socialist conscience. The whirlwind is coming. Marquez.

  The poet, Edwin Markham, drew his inspiration from Millet’s famous painting, now owned by the Crockers. The first lines captured the image in words.

  Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

  Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground…

  In the body of the poem Markham unleashed his wrath on the proprietors—the owners—who condemned the man with the hoe to a life of crushing labor.

  O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

  Is this the handiwork you give to God,

  This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quencht?

  The poem spread from paper to paper like a prairie fire. America embraced it as a literary sensation. Swampy Hellman didn’t embrace it, however. On one of his weekend visits, he found the tear sheet and complained to Mack.

  “This is garbage. This Markham, who is he? Some pink anarchist from New York?”

  “A schoolteacher. Oakland, I think.”

  “They got lynch ropes in Oakland too. You know what Mr. Huntington said about this? He said any man should be grateful to have a hoe.”

  “Come on, Markham’s right. Too many rich men exploit the poor. I like the poem.”

  “You like anything that’s radical. You’re a crazy person, a disgrace to your class. How you got such a fine son I don’t know. Here, I got things for him. A toy pistol. Genuine Colt reproduction, bang, bang. Outside there’s a little surrey you can hitch to a pony. He can ride around the estate.”

  Mack laughed. “When he can sit up. You’ll spoil him, Swampy.”

  “I got a right. I’m his grandpa.”

  And a queer old bandit, Mack thought. Marquez wrote of the whirlwind of rising expectations among workingmen. What would Swampy do if that storm caught him? As a matter of fact, what would he do?

  How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—

  With those who shaped him to the thing he is—

  When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,

  After the silence of the centuries?

  By March 1899, the old depot office at San Solaro had been remodeled and expanded. Watercolor renderings and a plaster model of the new town, complete with blue water in the canal, offered prospects an attractive view of their future residence. Mack had written personal letters to all of the people who had closed on the earliest lots, describing the new water system and his plans for a real community and encouraging them to consider a home in San Solaro. He had three replies from couples near retirement who said they would enthusiastically consider it.

  While the derricks pumped away, carpenters hammered up the framing for a row of four model cottages. They were done in Mission Revival, and were small neat homes of stucco with roofs of red tile and central patios to let in the sunshine and the fragrance of flowers. In his mind Mack defined the kind of future buyers he wanted in San Solaro: solid, settled middle-class folk eager to work or retire in Southern California. He didn’t want a town of country-club types, or part-time residents.

  He spent most of his weekdays in San Solaro while Johnson stayed in Arlington Heights to supervise the groves. The Texan had discarded his crutch and no longer limped so noticeably. Once a day he practiced walking in front of a mirror, balancing for minutes at a tim
e on his cork foot or simply standing and watching the reflection, making sure his shoulders were level. “Don’t want the field hands callin’ me a second-class man. Don’t want to give up my glorious polo career neither. Those fellas on the club, they start thinkin’ I’m a crip, they’re liable to vote me off. Ain’t fair, but that’s how people treat somebody with a hurt like this.”

  Mack returned to Villa Mediterranean every Friday and spent long hours with his son, whom he took to calling Little Jim. Carla usually wasn’t home, and when she was, she showed no interest in the baby. Mack’s interest, on the other hand, was boundless. Each new development—a gurgle that a proud father could misconstrue as speech, a bump on the gum that might be a tooth—was a source of wonder. Angelina Olivar tended the child well, and she never spoke a word against his mother.

  In April, construction began on a breakwater at San Pedro. After years of advances and reverses, C. P. Huntington at last gave up the harbor fight. Mack tried to imagine Huntington’s face—probably waxy and sullen with the rage of senility; he was almost eighty. Mack pictured Fairbanks too. It was shameful to be so vindictive, but he enjoyed it thoroughly.

  A few days later the Sundown Sea Realty people began bringing prospects from Los Angeles. If Mack had a free hour, he showed them around the tract personally. He was with a couple from Michigan one Thursday afternoon, strolling by the canal.

  “…so if you build a home here, you can be assured of a permanent water supply. San Solaro Irrigation, the company set up to be owned by the residents, just completed negotiations for all the land between here and Cat Canyon. The canyon runoff will be a primary source of our water. Wardlow Brothers is designing a two-thousand-foot tunnel to trap and channel the flow in the underground gravel beds. We’ll also have a diversion dam, and all the lines necessary to bring the water down here to a community reservoir. Pure, fresh water will be piped to every lot. It will fill this canal too, though the canal’s function is largely ornamental. The Wardlows are the best in the nation. They’re working this minute in those temporary offices you saw. As a general partner in San Solaro Irrigation, I’ll finance the system and you’ll vote ten shares of stock that accompany your building lot. Assuming, of course, that you decide to buy.”

  “I’ve decided,” said the gentleman, a retired bank officer. “I like the layout. And I like your cut, Mr. Chance. Straightforward.”

  Mack thought of Wyatt Paul’s hyperbole and smiled. “Well, I try to back up every promise.”

  “I do have a few more questions about—” The gentleman stopped, noticing a man from the Wardlow office hurrying toward them.

  The man drew Mack aside. “Mrs. Olivar just got through on the telephone. She asks that you come home right away.

  Your son has a bad fever—a hundred and three or four. He’s had it since Monday night, and the doctor can’t bring it down.”

  “What about Mrs. Chance? She’s there, isn’t she?”

  The man replied with an embarrassed nod. “Yes, sir. But Mrs. Olivar said…uh…she said your wife refused to be bothered. She told Mrs. Olivar to call you.” Mack apologized to the retired couple and left immediately.

  He also lost the sale.

  Riding the local trains, it took him most of the afternoon and part of the evening to get back, arriving at the Riverside station at half past nine. One of the housemen met him with a pair of saddle horses, and they galloped up to the heights. Mack was grimy from traveling and exhausted too; the hours en route had left him free to worry.

  He dashed directly upstairs to the large nursery. Doc Mellinger met him with encouraging news: The fever had broken about six o’clock, and Little Jim was sleeping comfortably.

  Carla was downstairs in the living room. Mack recognized the slurred speech and slightly foggy gaze. How long had she been at the liquor?

  “Carla, Jim’s your responsibility too. I can’t be here all the time.”

  With an airy wave and an unsteady step, she started for the sideboard. “Then someone else will have to be. I went through the ordeal of having him. That was enough.”

  He placed himself between his wife and the liquor decanters and jerked the glass from her hand. “Listen. For six months you’ve hardly looked at that boy. You let another woman suckle him—”

  “Yes.” She shuddered. “The very idea’s repulsive.”

  “—and you force Angelina to take care of him all day, every day, except when I can get home—”

  She pushed his arm. “Get out of the way. I want a drink.”

  “Keep your voice down. You don’t get another drink until I say so. I may never say so.”

  “Goddamn it, you run everything else—you’re not going to run me.” She struck at him with her fists. He dodged away, tossed the empty glass in a chair, and grasped her wrists, holding her easily. She tried to stamp his foot.

  “Carla, calm down and listen to me. I’m telling you again, you have a responsibility to the boy.”

  “Why? I didn’t want him. I don’t love him.”

  Mack let her go then. He stepped back and stared at her. “That’s the most obscene thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s the truth.” She beat her leg with her fist and started to cry. “I warned you I couldn’t handle marriage. Papa warned you. I was sick of it six months after the honeymoon. But I kept trying. I kept hoping it would be different with you. But it wasn’t. It isn’t.”

  “I don’t give a damn—you have a duty to that child.”

  “Duty? Go to hell. I’m not cut out for duty. I’m good for drinking, and for screwing, and for being shown off to your friends like a piece you bought at an auction gallery. But no duty, Mack. Fuck your duty. Fuck it. Fuck it.”

  She ran past him to the liquor, and this time he let her.

  He listened to the glassware clinking, and her crying, and tried to sort it all out. His emotions whipsawed back and forth between fury and compassion for her wretched state. How could he cope with this?

  He had to start by calming her. Touching her shoulder, he said as gently as he could, “Let’s go for a walk. It’s a beautiful evening. We’ll talk. We can work this out—”

  She reacted like a wild thing. Whirling around and ducking free of his hand, she threw the contents of the full glass into his face. The bourbon stung his eyes, fumed up his nose, and dripped from his lip.

  “We can work out nothing, Mack. Nothing!”

  He listened to the retreating footfalls, a frantic staccato. A door slammed; a bolt shot into its socket. He closed his eyes. Then he reached for the whiskey himself.

  He woke with hot light striping his face.

  He blinked several times while his brain slowly deciphered the meaning of the slanted sunshine. The light fell through the louvers of shutters left partly open in his office.

  His mouth tasted like wool and dirt. He rolled over before he realized he was close to the edge of the leather couch, and he fell on the polished floor with a nasty jolt that woke him fully. The clock behind his desk showed ten-fifteen. Picking up the empty bottle from beneath the couch, he placed it on the desk near the guidebook.

  His appearance in the crowded kitchen created a sudden hush.

  “Angelina? Is Little Jim—”

  “Fine, Señor Chance. The fever is gone. Imelda is with him while I eat breakfast.” Her brown hand hovered apologetically above a plate of corn cakes.

  Mack watched the cooks bustling at the stove and chopping block. Rodolfo Armendariz, the elegant majordomo, sampled soup simmering on a hearth hook, avoiding the eyes of the master of Villa Mediterranean. Rodolfo’s silver goatee matched the silver chasing of his short velvet jacket.

  “Is Mrs. Chance downstairs?” Mack asked him.

  The majordomo looked at him nervously, then handed the ladle to a cook’s assistant.

  “Rodolfo, what’s wrong?”

  The elderly Mexican gripped the lapels of his jacket and replied gravely. “Señor, your wife departed in her carriage shortly after daybreak. She
drove herself, by her own request.”

  “To go where?”

  “Señor, she did not tell us.”

  “Was she sober?”

  The majordomo avoided his eye again. One of the cooks rattled her implements, which was answer enough. Drunk and crazy out of her head. Damn her. Damn her.

  Wild-eyed, he ran up the staircase and flung open the doors of their bedroom suite. Empty drawers lay about, and the tall carved wardrobe stood open, everything removed. He walked toward it, feeling stupid and slow, as if someone had pounded him with heavy blows. He shut one door of the wardrobe, then the other. The mirrored front flashed an image of the unmade bed—and also of a folded note.

  He snatched it off the pillow, knowing what it would say almost before he identified the sloppy hand:

  Things are intolerable. I am leaving you.

  VI

  POWER AND GLORY

  1899-1903

  At the end of the century, San Francisco was old enough to be recognized as a major city. Her population approached 350,000, and she ranked second only to New York as a trading port. She was old enough to replace her tumble-down buildings with splendid new architecture, even skyscrapers. Page Brown’s new Ferry Building, with its 235-foot clock tower, loomed over the Embarcadero, and the new City Hall would be magnificent if they ever finished it.

  San Francisco was also fully old enough for a tradition of personal feuds. This grew in the dark soil of politics, watered by the blood of slain men in a climate that tolerated old-fashioned American violence.

  In 1859, U.S. Senator David Broderick, a Democrat, and Judge David Terry, also a Democrat, but of the hotly conservative “Chivalry” wing, exchanged insults, and Judge Terry challenged Broderick to a duel. They met on the shore of Lake Merced. Broderick was unfamiliar with dueling pistols, and his hair trigger discharged too soon. Given this advantage, Terry took careful aim and drilled Broderick’s chest dead center.

  New laws against dueling didn’t stop the feuds, however. In 1879, editor Charley de Young of the Chronicle criticized a political candidate in print, and the candidate promptly announced publicly that “Mother de Young once ran a whore house.” Charley de Young promptly shot him. The candidate lived, but his son entered the Chronicle offices one day in 1880 and shot Charley to death. Five years later, Mr. Adolph Spreckels, the sugar magnate, got so fed up with the paper’s personal attacks on him that he entered the editorial rooms and shot Charley de Young’s brother Mike, who was now in charge. A quick-witted bookkeeper in turn shot Mr. Spreckels. This time, both wounded men survived.